About Time I Finished This: I can fly! (Avernum: Escape From the Pit pt 26)

So, last time we wandered off the map past Fort Remote, and found a dragon.

At this point our goals for the end of the game are pretty clear: Slay Grah-Hoth, find Erika so she can help us escape, then find that exit to the surface so we can actually do so. We’re also starting to run out of other things to do. That said, there’s still a couple things to deal with. Namely, We know there’s some bandit trouble near Fort Spire, but for now there’s a couple things I want to deal with before I start pushing north.

First I need to buy a new boat. I’ve somehow managed to misplace the last one. They’re cheap enough that it’s not a major problem, but still it’s annoying.

Our target is the Waterfall Maze. You might remember we passed through it awhile back, we’re back to finish looking around, as there’s something here I want.The maze is honestly more annoying than dangerous you can’t get attacked while in your boat so you’re perfectly safe. The problem is the waterfalls are one way. so every path you explore ends with you needing to loop back around to the top of the maze. Fortunatly, the maze isn’t all that big, This island here is what we’re looking for.Hmm…Here’s the Stagnant Tunnels, a dungeon hiding in the waterfall maze. The thing we’re after is hiding in here.We also know the tunnels are home to basilisks.There’s also gazers in here. for the most part this place is fairly straight forward. Most of the dungeon is taken up by waterways you need to travel by boat.This means a lot of fighting in small, cramped, rooms with little risk of getting swarmed.Here we go…We’ve found the Orb of Thralni! I’ll get to what it’s for in a moment.Before we leave, past the orb is this library, that means books, and what do we get from them?These books give both shop-brought levels of the first 7 mage and priest spells. This is useless to me, but you had a party with a lot of spellcasters, or wanted to add more spellcasting later in the game? This is invaluable for quickly learning the basic spells without going broke in the process.We also pick up fireblast for my mage. It’s a strong, fire based lightening storm which I am totally fine with.With that done. I head here, to this place past Kyass’ Freehold. Originally we couldn’t get in because of the pit. but now that we can fly…The orbs gimmick is we can use it to fly. The game says flight only lasts 4 turns, so we can’t go far, and said flight only works outdoors but if we need to hop over an obstacle like this pit? We can do that now.It looks like we’ve stumbled into another teleport maze.At first this seems a bit odd. You teleport over to these hellhounds. If you take the teleporter behind them, you’ll loop to a previous area, and each time you come back here, they’ll be some hellhound shades waiting for you, with seemingly no way out.The trick is to look for some switches in the previous little cave, that opens up a new teleporter…Leading here.So we end up going through a hidden path in a looping series of teleports, to get past an illusory wall to find… undead? The exit off to the side is the teleport out of here. It all seems a bit pointless, that is until you find another hidden switch.That leads to a barrier we can dispell, and more interestingly, that’s the crown of the empire on the wall.That’s a lot of empire troops.There’s a LOT of troops back there, the best way to handle the fight is to hide behind the door, throwing spells into the room while the melee fighters fight off anyone who tries to get in.Eventually, their numbers will thin out enough for you to go in and finish the job.Our reward for all that? We find this guy. He’s a scribe and despite being utterly harmless, has absolutely no problems talking dawn to us and putting on his brave face.

That said he’s not too good at it, he let’s slip there’s a scroll in the outpost, and offers it in exchange for his life. Sadly,u he made the offer AFTER telling me where it was, so since i’m a Scimitar and hate the empire, I simply kill him when given the option.

Interestingly, before I do so, he does tell me he’d go to Formello if I let him flee, as the empire has an agent there. The interesting thing is we recently killed said agent, but there’s no dialogue option to tell him this. Part of me kind of wonders what would happen if I let him go and went to Formello to look for him, but it’s a tad too late for that.Past a couple guard Baslisks is the scroll. not sure where we can use this, We’ll likely stumble across that later.With all that done I decide to do one final thing for now. Remember when we tried to fight Kyass but couldn’t manage it? Let’s try that again.Even with my party a lot stronger than last time, the fight is still pretty crazy. and endless number of troops enter the room through those stairs, and fighting Kyass makes the entire city hostile The number of people and defenders in view of Kyass means we’re pretty quickly surrounded.The good news is nobody really does all that much damage. Once I’ve thinned the crowd enough. I can focus on Kyass and ignore the extra troops. Curiously, the kitchen staff keeps out of it despite the fight being in full view of them.The fight seems to go on forever, as Kyass can take an insane beating, until finally…There we go. got him.At this point you’ve more or less won the fight, though it’s not quite over. Enemies will stop coming down the stairs, but anybody still in town is hostile. you can get some treasure in Kyass’ quarters, and Cenac is still in the tower if you didn’t deal with him, Though it seems I can’t get in there now. Either way, that’s the end of the Freehold.I go back to the castle to deliver the news, then decide to stop here for now. While a few quests are still out there, we’ve tied up just about every major loose end before we start heading towards Fort spire to deal with those bandits, and push on towards the endgame.